About Edisyn

Edisyn (European Dialect Syntax) is a project on dialect syntax funded by the European Science Foundation. It runs at the Meertens Institute in Amsterdam from September 2005 until September 2010 (partially extended till March 2012). It aims at achieving two goals. One is to establish a European network of (dialect) syntacticians that use similar standards with respect to methodology of data collection, data storage and annotation, data retrieval and cartography. The second goal is to use this network to compile an extensive list of so-called doubling phenomena from European languages/dialects and to study them as a coherent object. Since these phenomena primarily occur in non-standard varieties, their existence has gone largely unnoticed in the linguistic literature. The Edisyn project will therefore greatly enhance the empirical basis of syntactic research. Cross-linguistic comparison of doubling phenomena will enable us to test or formulate new hypotheses about natural language and language variation.

One of the deliverables of the Edisyn project is a web-based search engine to search different linguistic corpora simultaneously and show the combined search results. This search engine is able to make differently structured (dialect) databases comparable. Although the initial set up of the Edisyn project was to create similar standards for dialectal databases, in practice this has proven to be an unfeasable goal since most databases have a different structure and enrichment. Consequently, the Edisyn search engine has been created according to a more pragmatic philosophy and is able to handle databases of various structures.